Cheating spiritualist minister jailed for life for murdering his wife

Spiritualist minister David Chenery-Wickens, who spun a web of deceit to hide
up to ten affairs has been jailed for life for murdering his wife Diane
after she threatened to expose his sordid double life.

The 52-year-old, who was described as the most compulsive liars detectives had ever come across, was found guilty of killing Diane, 48, an award-winning BBC make-up artist, and dumping her body in woodland.

David Chenery-Wickens was scared his wife would expose him

Her family welcomed the verdict, saying that a “dangerous, predatory charlatan” had been removed from society and that the “enormous scale of his deceptions was matched by his depravity”.

Chenery-Wickens juggled at least ten lovers, many of them well-do-to but also vulnerable women who had sought his help as a spiritualist minister and psychic over depression and broken marriages. He told them he was separated and selling his marital home, and conned one, an opera singer, out of as much as £21,000 to treat fabricated ailments including cancer and pay legal bills for his fake divorce. His deceit was so compulsive that he was nicknamed the Vicar of Fibley.

Chenery-Wickens killed his wife in January last year after she challenged him about calls to gay sex chatlines and mistresses on their shared phone bill.

Police discovered he had asked a mistress how to get blood out of a carpet in the days following the murder, as well as contacting at least three other lovers to beg for sex and inviting a man he met on a gay sex chatline to his marital home.

In the witness had claimed his wife was an adulterous drunk who knew her marriage was over but forced him to tell his lies – including that his son suffered a near-fatal car crash – so those closest to them would not find out.

Ordering him to serve at least 17 years behind bars, Mr Justice Cooke told him his lack of remorse, attempts to blacken his late wife’s name and willingness to lie under oath were “potent aggravating factors”.

He said it was clear his wife had loved him and supported him financially over many years, and he repaid her by infidelity with both men and women, lies and disloyalty before either strangling or stabbing her when she told him to get out of her home.

“You put her family through the agonies of not knowing whether she was alive or dead but hoping again hope that she was alive, until their worst fears were realised,” he said.

“You lied to all and sundry with ever changing stories as new evidence came to light, and continued to maintain the most preposterous lies before the jury.”

Speaking after the trial, Diane’s brother Russell said his sister was a “sweet, kind, thoughtful and loving woman”.

“Today’s verdict does two very important things: it wipes out once and for all the many lies that have been said about Diane and it removes a dangerous, predatory charlatan from society.

“We have had to listen to the lies and fabrications of a delusional man,” he said. “The enormous scale of his deceptions we know now was matched only by his depravity. He betrayed everyone he met. However, his grossest betrayal was of the woman who deserved it least – Diane.”

Det Chf Insp Steve Johns, of Sussex Police, who led the case, said Chenery-Wickens’ willingness to lie had astonished his officers.

He said: “There comes a point where you don’t need to show somebody as more of a liar than you already have or more of a charlatan than you already have.”

The 48-year-old’s body was not found until four months after her death by a dog walker a mile from the steam railway near their home in Duddleswell, East Sussex, where the killer worked as a volunteer.

Her husband at first claimed she had vanished after a meeting in London but, when confronted with CCTV evidence showing he boarded a train to the capital alone, he said she had run away because she could not cope with the shame of her broken marriage, making her husband promise not to tell her family or friends.

A rising star in the spiritual world, Chenery-Wickens boasted celebrity clients, had added to his repertoire exorcism and horse whispering and claimed to be guided by the spirit of a native American Indian called Wild Fox.

Within a matter of months of meeting Diane, he had moved into her flat and within weeks of that, in June 1997, they were married at Wandsworth Town Hall.

Diane’s friends said the pair seemed mismatched from the start, even though she referred to the balding reverend as “my soul mate”.

She was 37, grammar-school educated, sociable and wealthy, with a close-knit family in the country and an incredible career. He was a 40-year-old South London lorry driver, divorced and penniless, but with professed psychic abilities that seemed to fascinate women.

His best man, Karel Van Bommel, said: “I was his best man because he had no friends.

“He moved into her flat with just a plastic bag. “She did everything for him, buying him clothes, finding him work.

“When we asked her why she had married him, she would simply say: 'Because he asked me’.”

The marriage was happy until Diane’s career took off. She won an Emmy for her work on Arabian Nights, was nominated for a Bafta for Dead Ringers and worked on some of Britain’s most celebrated television shows, including Frenchman’s Creek, Pride and Prejudice and the League of Gentleman.

Meanwhile, her husband developed a sordid double life and seemed to thrive on the elaborate tales he spun about haunted families and dying children who needed his help.

Rev Marlene Thompson ran the Jarvis Brook Spiritual Centre in Crowborough where he worked until she threw him out in 2007.

She said he tried to seduce her by telling her that her husband had six months to live, and suggesting she transfer her affections to him.

She said: “He was like Jack Nicholson’s devil in the film The Witches of Eastwick.

“He used his position of trust to find out vulnerable, telling them he needed to know their darkest secrets to heal them.